Re: NEC-LIST: What is BLT and TCL/TK??

Hi All,

TCL/TK is a scripting language developed by John Ousterhout who works
for Sun. He is continuously developing the program for multiple
platforms.

There is a group of people at Bell Labs Design Automation who have
developed the BLT and [incr]TCL extensions. [incr]TCL is the object
oriented version of TCL. The group also works on compiling the tools
and making them available for Microsoft. The more popular operating
system is UNIX. TCL/TK has been used in many projects which involve
engineering. I think examples are on the TCL/TK web site. This is one
of the best TCL/TK web sites:

http://www.tcltk.com/

Mike McLennan, who is a member of the Bell Lab's team, has co-authored
books on the language. They also teach short courses on location or in
different regions. These course are great for anyone really interested
in learning the language. The courses usually run a week and cover
TCL/TK the first few days and [incr]TCL the last couple.

TK adds a ton of built in graphic features and a very powerful
canvas. The canvas has built in support for picking objects with the
mouse and highlighting and moving them...etc.

BLT is a library which adds things like vectors, splines, graphs, and
bitmap manipulation.

The language can also be used for web and cgi-scripting and has the
ability to talk back and forth to the server. The one drawback is that
the browser needs a plug-in. I believe the current graphics are more
powerful than the Java AWT although Java now supports OpenGL. The
problem with Java and OpenGL is that to get fast redraws the user has
to have some type of a plug-in(third party software) because OpenGL
written in true java is very slow. I believe that the OpenGL api is
now available for TCL but I don't have any information about it.

The one thing that I consider a drawback about TCL is the fact that
since it is a scripting language you must have the TCL shell installed
on your computer. As far as I know there are no compiled versions of
TCL programs. On another note, the next version of PERL (it might
already be available) is supposed to be able to compile stand alone
programs.

Regards,

Joe Finnerty
Received on Mon Mar 09 1998 - 12:43:49 EST